Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Then ensued a slight anticlimax, for the Head, though a very strong man in hand and arm, found it impossible to do as he had designed, and tear three hundred pages across and across. But the form generally, and Mr. Dutton in particular, were too stiff with horror to notice it. So, instead, the Head tore off section after section of the lightly sewn leaves, instead of tearing the pages, laid the dismembered carrion on the floor, and stamped on it, and then, with an indescribable ejaculation of disgust, threw the mutilated remains into the fireplace.

  “You are excused, Mr. Dutton,” he said, “from the rest of this lesson, which I will take myself; but you will do me the honour to call on me immediately after evensong this afternoon.”

  His fierce eye wandered from Mr. Dutton’s stricken face to David’s desk, where lay the inky dart.

  “You are engaged now, I see, in some inquiry,” he said. “A paper dart, I perceive, on Blaize’s desk. I will conduct the inquiry myself, and wish you a good afternoon.”

  He waited in tense silence till Mr. Dutton had taken his hat and left the room. Then he turned to David.

  “Blaize, did you make that dart, or did you throw it?” he asked.

  An expression of despairing determination had come into David’s face. He was conscious also of a large ink-stain on his lips.

  “Neither, sir,” he said.

  “Then who made it?” said the Head. “And also, for I perceive the point is blunted, who threw it?”

  Dead silence on David’s part.

  “Do you know?” asked the Head.

  “Yes, sir,” said David.

  “And do you refuse to tell me? I am not here to be bullied, I may remind you.”

  David felt slightly sick, but he had swallowed a good deal of chewed pen-handle.

  “Do you refuse to tell me?’ repeated the Head.

  “Yes, sir,” said David.

  Then came one of those strange calms in the middle of cyclones, which sometimes puzzled the boys. But their conjecture, a perfectly right one, was that the Head, in spite of questions like these, did not like “sneaking.” Anyhow, for a moment his fierceness faded, and he nodded at David, just as one pal might nod to another in sympathetic assent.

  “Quite right, my boy,” he said.

  Then he turned to the rest of the class, holding up the bedraggled weapon.

  “Name,” he said.

  The miserable Bags stood up, without speech.

  “Oh you, Crabtree,” said the awful voice. “And so Master Crabtree thinks that the calm and quiet of Sunday afternoon is made to give him leisure to forge these filthy weapons: that the paper you are given to write home on is designed to be desecrated to these foul usages, and the ink to supply filth to them. You will write out with the ink you have so strangely misused two hundred lines of Virgil in copper-plate hand, and eat your dinner at the pig-table, apart from your companions, for the next week.”

  The pig-table, it may be mentioned, was a separate table in the dining-room without chairs, where boys detected in swinish habits had to take their meals standing for the period of their sentence. But poor Bags’s cup was not full yet, for the Head’s eagle eye fell on David’s inky mouth.

  “I infer that the ink on Blaize’s lips was made by this weapon, “ he said. “That is so? Then you will now beg Blaize’s pardon, and as soon as the Catechism and Bible-class is over, you will fetch a basin of water and bathe Blaize’s mouth with your own sponge, until it is pronounced clean by your matron. The hour for writing home is up. Sign your names, and direct your envelopes. Catechism!”

  Now the Catechism-class had already been held, and the marks for it had been put down in the mottled-covered book which lay on Mr. Dutton’s desk. But to suggest or hint this was not less inconceivable than to propose playing leap-frog. The more imaginative saw that there might be fresh trouble when Catechism marks were put down, and it was found that Mr. Dutton had already entered them in his neat small handwriting, but the idea of venturing to correct the Head when he was in this brimstone-mood was merely unthinkable. David, indeed, the boldest of them all, and, at the moment, with something of the halo of martyrdom about him, wondered what would happen if he did so, but quailed before the possible result.

  So Catechism began again, and for a little all went smoothly. The Head, of course, knew that among small boys at school Christian names are held to be effeminate and disgraceful things, and so, omitting the first question, asked Stone, the head-boy, who had given him his name, and Stone knew. Ferrers also knew what his godfathers and godmothers then did for him, and David expressed himself accurately as bound to believe and to do what they had promised for him. The Commandments went smoothly, but trouble began when the boys had to explain what they chiefly learned from those Commandments. Any meaning that they might have possessed, any effort to attach rational ideas to them, was overshadowed by the fact that, primarily, this was a lesson that should have been acquired by heart in order to recite it faultlessly to that awe-inspiring presence that frowned at Mr. Dutton’s desk. His duty towards his neighbour had already baffled David that afternoon, but for the moment, having recited the eighth Commandment, his turn was passed, and, troubles never coming singly, Bags was faced with this abstruse question. The first sentences went rightly enough, but then he began to falter.

  “To honour and obey the King and all that are put in authority under her—”

  “Her?” asked the Head.

  Bags’s Prayer-book, a comparatively ancient one, given him at his christening by a godmother, was a Queen’s Prayer-book.

  “Queen, and all that are put in authority under her,” he quavered, getting confused.

  “Next, “ said the Head.

  “King and all that are put in authority under him,” said Sharpe Major in a shrill treble. “To submit myself to all my governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters; to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters; to — to honour and obey the King—”

  “Next,” said the Head, with ominous calm.

  The dreary tale of failure went on: with that portentous figure sitting in the chair of the innocuous Mr. Dutton, consecutive thought became impossible, and memory took wings and fled. Boys who had got full marks earlier in the afternoon found themselves unable, when facing this grim mood of the Head’s, to repeat their duty towards anything. The ground already covered was taken again, in order to give them a fresh start, and now the Creed itself presented pitfalls and stumbling-blocks. Already the normal hour for the class had been exceeded, and from other and happier class-rooms the boys poured out into the field in front of the windows, or lay on rugs under the shade of the big still elms, and with linked arms and treble intercourse wandered across the sunny grass. And even when the Catechism was done, there was the Bible-lesson to follow, and before the Bible-lesson there was certain to be the discovery that the Catechism had already been put down. All this was that ass Dubs’s fault for leaving his rotten French novel on his desk.

  Worse than anything, the Bible-lesson, when it came, was that most inexplicable second voyage of St. Paul. Thyatira... or was it Laodicea?... or were they the seven churches of Asia... and what exactly did underpinning the ship mean, or was that manœuvre executed on the other voyage T Mr. Dutton always consulted the New Testament Maclear over this elusive cruise, whereas the boys had to shut up that useful volume when they were questioned. It seemed scarcely fair. And even the Bible-lesson had not been arrived at yet; they were still sticking and bogged in the quagmires of the Catechism.

  At last they stuck altogether: there was no more progression possible. It only remained to hear the sentence on their condemned heads. Everybody without exception was condemned. One had to write out the Creed, another the Commandments, and all their duty towards their neighbours.

  “And I shall myself take the same lesson today week,” said the Head, “and if the form generally does not show a far better knowledge of the Catechism, I shall be unable to adopt the leniency with which I have treated their short
comings to-day. Next Sunday, then, I shall hold the class in my study.”

  The significance of this was not lost upon anybody. The study was a room of awful import, and the comfort of the low red morocco settee, the interest of the photographs of Oxford crews on the wall, in which the Head appeared with side-whiskers and no beard could not compensate for the uneasy knowledge that in the middle drawer of the knee-hole table at which he sat were a couple of canes. It was no rare thing for the Head to take a bunch of rattling keys from his pocket, which was the first step, and to fit one of them into the centre drawer. Sometimes, with rising voice, he turned it and opened the drawer, and if things still went badly the trembling victim was put through the farce of choosing which cane he preferred and then advancing the palms of his hands....

  The Head paused after this prodigious announcement about the venue for the Catechism-class next Sunday and opened the mark-book. Mr. Dutton was scrupulously neat in his methods, and there in the first column of the marks for the new week was his list, headed “Catechism.” The Head scrutinised these in silence.

  “The marks for to-day’s Catechism are already entered,” he said. “Stone, you are the head-boy of the class, why did you not tell me that Mr. Dutton had already heard you your Catechism? I will tell you why. You wanted me to waste my time and yours, so that we should not have so long for the Bible-lesson. Was that it, sir?”

  “N-no,” said Stone.

  “What was your reason, then, for not telling me?”

  Stone looked at him in a sort of stunned despair.

  “I don’t know, sir, “ he said.

  It was indeed a black afternoon. The Head, probably owing to his discovery on Mr. Dutton’s desk, was in his sternest and most awful mood. Already five o ‘clock had struck, whereas the lesson should have been over by half-past four, and outside the boys were beginning to gather up their rugs and books, and were strolling over the grass of the cricket-field to the school-buildings from which the warning bell for tea was invitingly clanging. It was maddening to think that all this time might have been saved, and all the impositions and the hour next Sunday in the dreaded study avoided if only, as it now turned out, Stone had had the courage to say that Mr. Dutton had already heard them their Catechism. But courage was not a quality that blossomed when the Head was in a poor temper, and every boy in the class knew that if he had been in Stone’s place he would have held his tongue. He might easily have been told not to “bully” the Head (a somewhat favourite expression) or have been witheringly requested to give him permission to conduct the class in the manner he preferred. Chapel was held at six, and when tea was to come in was difficult of conjecture. Yet even a tea-less chapel would be something of a relief, if only the three-quarters of an hour that intervened could be got through without storms. But before then they would have to embark on this missionary enterprise, which, if it was as dangerous for St. Paul, as it was likely to prove for the students of it, must have required a bold heart. And what added sting to it was that Stone had received a hamper from home only the day before, on which to-night his friends would have gorged sumptuously.

  The minutes went by with paralysed slowness, for, if the Catechism had been trying, this was infinitely worse. The Head, who very likely wanted his tea too, but for the sake of discipline and education mortified his appetite as well as those of the boys, took a gloomier and gloomier view of them and their attainments. Collateral ignorance of the position of Iconium was seen to be a moral crime of the deepest dye, and the dictionary was beggared of wounding epithets in order adequately to convey the enormity of not knowing its position as regards Lystra. If Ferrers Major had committed parricide under circumstances of unique horror he could not have been held up to blacker obloquy than was volleyed on him for his remarks about Thessalonica. None escaped the task of making a map with the names of the principal towns and the track of the journey itself in red ink; the less fortunate had to produce two maps by this time next week, and the only thing it was possible to be thankful for was that this nightmare of an hour had not been taken in the study. Else, it was felt, the function of the keys would not have been limited to mere rattling.

  Already the field was beginning to be dotted over again with groups of boys who had come out of tea and were waiting for chapel-bell to ring. How earnestly it was possible to desire chapel-time to come David had never known before, but anything, even the Litany, or, as would happen today, the psalm for the fifteenth evening of the month, which had seventy-two verses, was better than this sulphurous divinity-less on. The whole class was limp with heat and hunger and terror. Then the merciful relief of the querulous bell came, and the Head closed his Bible.

  “The lesson has been disgraceful, “ he said. “I hope for all your sakes — I say, I hope — that next Sunday will not be a repetition of to-day. I am more particularly distressed when I think that some of you, like Blaize, are the sons of clergymen, and have therefore greater opportunities of studying sacred history.”

  He got up huge and towering, in his rustling silk gown, and immediately, as was the amazing manner of him, who never nagged however severe he might be, his mood completely changed, and his eyes twinkled as he observed the depressed class.

  “There, my boys, that’s over,” he said; “and, like good fellows, try not to make me angry with you again. I hate finding fault: you may not believe it, but I do. And neither you nor I have had any tea, so, when chapel is over, you will all go to the housekeeper’s room and ask her, with my compliments, to give you a real good tea.”

  He stalked out, rocking slightly as he went, and instantly, the oppression of his anger being gone, the spirits of the class rose sky-high.

  “Jolly decent of him,” said Ferrers. “Gosh, I’m glad he didn’t take us in the study.”

  “I say, Blazes, I wouldn’t have my mouth washed with Bags’s sponge. It’ll be fit to poison you. Why, do you know what he does with his sponge?”

  Loathsome details, invented on the spur of the moment, followed.

  “Fancy being washed by Bags at all,” said Stone. “He don’t know how to wash himself yet!”

  “Stone, you fool, why the devil couldn’t you tell the Head that Dubs had taken the Catechism?” This from Bags.

  “Anyhow, I’m glad my father isn’t a clergyman, like Blaize’s. Do you do divinity with him in the study on Sunday afternoon in the holidays? Whack, whack. ‘There, my boy!’ ‘Oh, papa, don’t hit me!’ Whack, whack! ‘Oh papa!’ squeaked Sharpe Major.

  David, by a dexterous movement, got Sharpe’s head in Chancery, rubbed his nose on his desk, pulled his hair, and hit him over the biceps.

  “Any more remarks about papa?” he asked cheerfully. “Come on, out with them.”

  CHAPTER II

  THE others poured out into the sunshine, but David lingered behind with Bags and Ferrers Major, and began burrowing in his locker to find the box belonging to his two stag-beetles. They were male and female, as the lady’s absence of long horns testified, and it was hoped that even in confinement she might some day be confined. Indeed, there were several bets on, as to which form the babies would take — whether they would be eggs or some sort of caterpillar, or minute but fully developed stag-beetles. The box in question was a small cardboard oblong, of cramped dimensions; but really it was no more than their saloon travelling-carriage, for they lived in David’s washing-basin at night, since it had been ascertained that the sides of it were too steep and slippery to allow their escape, and at other times had the run of his desk in school-hours, and were allowed quantities of healthy exercise when their owner was unoccupied and could look after their wayward steps. But now, since after chapel David would not come back to the class-room, it was necessary to put them in their travelling-carriage, which was pierced with holes, so that such air as there might happen to be in David’s pocket should penetrate to them. A few slips of grass and leaves would be sufficient to sustain them until they were regaled with bits of cake and a strawberry or two from the tea which w
as to be provided for the first form after chapel.

  The lady was lying on her back, as good as gold, waving her legs slowly in the air, having probably fallen down on some climbing expedition about the roof of the locker, but the stag himself (called “The Monarch of the Glen”) could not at once be found. But a little careful rummaging disclosed him sitting morosely in a crevice between a grammar and a geography book.

  “I say, I don’t believe the Monarch’s well,” said David.

  “Shouldn’t think so, living in your fuggy desk,” said Bags, strolling out of the room.

  Suddenly David perceived, as by a special revelation, that he must kick Bags. Bags had thrown an inky dart at him, and though, in the depression of the Bible-lesson, that had been forgotten, it started into prominence again in his mind. Further, Bags had added insult to injury by saying that his desk was fuggy. Certainly he must kick Bags, just once, juicily, and call it all square.

  David gingerly took the Monarch by the waist, so that his pincers nipped the empty air, and put him and his spouse into their travelling carriage.

  “Come on, Ferrers,” he said.

  On their way across to chapel he paused a moment to pick a few leaves from the bright squibs of root-growth on the elm just outside the classroom, and took Ferrer’s arm.

  “Don’t let’s go too quick, “ he said. “I want to catch Bags up just as we get to chapel-door, and if I was alone he might suspect. Then you’ll see:

  I’ll give him one kick, just one, but a beauty. Let’s seem to be talking.”

  Diabolically diplomatic, David managed his manœuvre well, gradually gaining on his unsuspecting victim, and stalking him with infinite stealth and relish. There was no question of honour in coming behind him thus unaware, for Bags had launched a dart at him without provocation, and had also gone jauntily across to chapel after making that ill-advised remark about David’s fuggy desk. Should Bags resent a good sound kick, which was a pretty just payment of the score, David would be perfectly happy to fight him afterwards if he desired it. It was quite all right.